TheMarker Café

» see cafe.themarker.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

TheMarker is the business daily of the Haaretz group, and in February 2007 it did something newspapers were trying everywhere that year: it built a social network and pointed its own readers at it. The pitch was business networking for adults, in Hebrew, hosted by a paper people already trusted with their money news. Adam Shov edited it. Members got a profile, a blog, communities to join, and somewhere to put photos.

Under the wordmark ran a strip of small caps naming what the site was for. The last of the three words was "PLEASURE," which is not a word a business paper usually prints on its own logo, and it tells you the thing was not meant to stay a LinkedIn clone for long. It did not. Within a couple of years its busiest corners were the food and television communities, which had a community manager of their own, and the long argumentative blogging that Hebrew had very few other homes for.

A TBWA Digital survey in its first year placed it third among social networks in Israel. That was the high-water mark, and it was reached before Facebook had a Hebrew interface worth using.

~ the record ~

~ the slow part ~

Shov left the editor's chair after about a year, and nobody really took the role back. The site stayed moderated but stopped being managed, which in practice means the bloggers who were there kept writing and nobody went looking for new ones. Israeli coverage of the closure put traffic near the end at around 250,000 visits a month, most of it arriving from search engines rather than from anyone who knew the place existed.

That last detail is the honest shape of a dead community site. Long after the community has gone, the archive keeps earning hits, because fifteen years of Hebrew writing about recipes and television is exactly the kind of thing Google keeps serving to strangers.

~ the delete ~

In July 2020 the paper announced the end and gave members months of notice with one instruction: back up whatever you want to keep, right now, yourself. The content would not be preserved and would not stay reachable. One Israeli media site covering the announcement called it thirteen years of activity going dark and said a black flag was flying over the decision, which is about as angry as trade press gets about a product shutdown.

The complaint was not that the site was closing. Everyone could see the traffic. The complaint was that a newspaper, an institution whose entire function is keeping a record, had looked at fifteen years of writing by its own readers and decided the cheapest exit was to erase it.

~ the 503 ~

The announcement said months. The server took nineteen more of them. The Internet Archive has cafe.themarker.com answering normally at 19 KB per capture straight through 2021 and into February 2022, with the last successful fetch at 17:28:59 UTC on 9 February 2022. The next crawl, 2022-02-10 at 20:20:32, gets a 503 and a backend connection timeout. It has returned that same error on every crawl since, which is now more than four years of a load balancer answering for a machine that is not there.

So the archive holds the front page but not most of what the front page was for. Member blogs under cafe.themarker.com were crawled unevenly and the deep ones largely were not crawled at all.

One small Hebrew page outlived the site it was built for. dorontal.net ran a tag search engine for the Café, made by a reader because the Café's own tag search did not go deep enough. After July 2020 the owner rewrote it as a recovery notice: TheMarker Cafe has closed, most of the posts can be restored from the archive, and here is the Wayback Machine link. A third-party search tool turning into the closest thing a service has to a memorial is a small, specific kind of ending.

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